


That I Might Dutifully Recall

by maybethrice



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Canon, Cousin Incest, F/M, Family, Hurt/Comfort, Incest, Speculation, Woman on Top, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-07
Updated: 2012-02-07
Packaged: 2017-10-30 18:15:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/334662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybethrice/pseuds/maybethrice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How sweet her homecoming would be, if only she could stay in Winterfell. How sweet her reunion with her only remaining brother would be, if only Jon Snow were her brother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That I Might Dutifully Recall

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Porn Battle XIII, for the prompts "home, fire, furs, comfort, hair, lonely, peace, shiver, spine, Winterfell". This is probably the most questionable thing I've ever written, even though it is a completely consensual basket of cuddling kittens by comparison to the books themselves. I'm proceeding on some of my own spoilery assumptions about Martin's canon, specifically to do with Jon's parentage, which of course everyone has their own opinions on, but I subscribe to the [prevailing theory](http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Jon_Snow/Theories). Given the story dynamic, I'm not sure if that changes anything about the incest warnings to this. Title from David Gray's ["Fixative"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-3O_on2w-c).

It is still deepest winter when Sansa sees her brother Jon again after years apart. The wars are over and she is home in Winterfell, and so, finally, is he. Jon is limping across the yard with his direwolf and Sansa’s knees go weak with the sight of him, with the reunion she wished for so strongly those years before in the Vale, though she stands firm and doesn’t cry at seeing him alive and mostly well. She is home and so is Jon, and they are together; the Starks in Winterfell.

(Sansa thinks briefly that she never considered Jon her true brother when they were children, and only fleetingly of the revelation that he’s not her brother at all in the end. But her brothers and her sister are all dead or gone, and Jon is the only one of them that she knows she has left and Sansa has learned to be grateful of what has been saved and not despairing of what she has lost.)

If Jon expected to find her the haughty girl he parted ways with when she went south and he to the Wall in the North, he does an admirable job of hiding it. He bends to his knee at her feet, though he is the new Lord of Winterfell, and kisses her gloved hand while his knees are wet with snow. Then he stands straight, seeming head and shoulders taller than Sansa remembers him, and hugs her so tightly that her breath leaves her lungs in a rush. Every night, she prayed among the roots of the weirwood that her family would be returned to her, and here is Jon.

There are few festivities here, not while the North is still recovering, but Jon has been away to see to the lands he’s meant to inherit now and Sansa has been in Winterfell for some long time to oversee the rebuilding of the castle. There is food brought from the Free Cities, a gift from their Dragon Queen for Jon and the North, but mostly for Jon. That night Sansa drinks so much honey wine that her cheeks turn the pink of blooming roses and laughs for the first time in so long that it feels like some layer of ice on her heart is thawing. She feels lively and too-warm and faintly happy. Jon reaches over while talking to an enormous, young maester in black and stills her hands before she can remove her fur-lined cloak. When she opens her mouth to tell him that the wine has made her warm enough, he smiles and she allows him to adjust the direwolf clasp holding it to her throat. 

Sansa is more careful with the honey wine after that, but when the drinking is done and Winterfell has retired to sleep, she dons her cloak over her nightdress and chases shadows down the halls until she reaches Jon’s old room. Her steps are measured and even, and the warmth of the wine has faded. There is a quiet noise from inside, and when the door swings open abruptly, Sansa tries not to be very surprised by the steel in Jon’s hand. She too has known danger and fear and the bite of winter these last years. (But Sansa has not let it bite too deep. She is, after all, the blood of the wolf which knows that winter comes, the same that Jon is.) There are candles lit and books and letters strewn across the table by the fire, and when her eyes are finished sweeping his room for something, whatever threat she expected to find, she brings herself to look at him.

“Jon,” she says and watches the firelight gleam in his blade. There is the dragonglass shortsword he carried on his hip near his bedside table. Sansa keeps a polished dagger with a blade like onyx for the same purpose in her skirts, an old habit made obsolete that she doesn’t know how to break.

He turns his back to her and pushes the sword back into its scabbard, then sets it against the chair by the fire. “I wasn’t expecting you,” he says in a heavy, weary voice. Sansa knows why he wouldn’t have anticipated her coming, though she has been thinking of him since his snow-dusted figure appeared in the gates. She was never kind to him before. It isn’t intuitive what to say to him now to make up for the frigid years of their childhood, nor even what could express her regrets about these recent years, hers and his.

“Winterfell is empty,” Sansa finally says in explanation and stands nearer to the fire than the door. “There is only you and I left and I...”

“I know,” Jon says and turns to face her with a taut smile. Sansa finally recognizes his weariness as the same that weighs on her heart and takes a few unwilling steps in his direction. Jon is so much more like her than she has ever admitted to herself, so much more her brother now that he isn’t. She has given little thought to how the changes must feel to him: the sharp severance of his vows to the men of the Night’s Watch, even the loss of the identity of bastard he was forced to embrace from his cursed birth. The thought of it all, the memory of a sister’s dismissive cruelty, makes Sansa’s heart twist painfully in her chest. If only she had been kinder, if only.

“I didn’t mean any of it,” she blurts and looks away from his insufferably kind face, the expression that offers a naive and ignorant forgiveness. Jon doesn’t know what to forgive her for any more than she knows how to heal his scars. He wears black like a standard, a more familiar comfort than that of House Stark, though there are so few of his brethren remaining in a changed Watch. “It was wrong of me.”

“Sansa,” Jon sighs and she thinks how lovely her name sounds like that, how like her father he seems when the firelight strikes him just so. “It was so long ago, and so many things have happened.” He leaves the rest implied, that they are so different than the children they had been, but Sansa does not dare to imagine that he would have forgotten those things.

Her eyes seek anything to hold to and find a nearby letter, one of many bearing the seal of the dragon. A Queen’s proposal. The thing that has kept Jon awake and pacing like the direwolf of his that patrols the walls. Sansa forgets to avert her eyes, or to wait an appropriate amount of time to change the subject of their conversation, or to avoid indelicate questions entirely. 

“Will you marry her?” 

Jon lifts the letter nearest him and smiles ruefully as he skims it. Daenerys Stormborn is a forceful woman and a determined queen, but she is an outsider as much as her royal ancestors were when they conquered Westeros. She has the strength and the experience as a ruler, but she does not know her people. Still, Sansa knows that Jon is grateful for her. He was one of many bastards she legitimized to prevent the fall of the great houses, though Jon has stubbornly continued using his bastard’s name. Perhaps, if he marries the Queen, he will choose Targaryen or Stark, whether he is the Queen’s nephew or Sansa’s brother.

“She has a husband,” Jon finally says to her in a measured tone that makes Sansa smile, knowing it for the practiced formality that it is. 

“And three dragons, and a legacy to uphold.” Sansa folds her hands in front of her and Jon looks at her with a puzzled expression. “But I suppose that does not decide whether you will be her second husband.”

Jon’s lips turn upward. “It does not. Nor does wine, or a friend’s guidance.” He means, of course, the maester in black. Sam Tarly, she recalls, and summons the memory of the man’s father when she saw him in King’s Landing. 

“Will you accept a sister’s guidance?” 

His sky-grey eyes flash with something brief and unreadable. Sansa almost regrets the words, but Jon’s awkward gesture to bring her closer to the fire lacks the tension she might expect from someone offended by something she’s said. (Jon isn’t as familiar with these niceties, having known all his life he would never be received in society, and he seems almost guileless to Sansa for it.)

“I will accept whatever guidance you can offer me, Sansa.” Jon seals the bottle of wine on the table, throws more kindling onto the fire, and Sansa removes her cloak. This time, he doesn’t stop her when she works the clasp apart.

“There must always be a Stark in Winterfell, Jon,” she begins and spares him a true smile when he gives her something warm to drink. It tastes woody and harsh, but she cups it between her hands and composes herself to look as dignified and grounded as she can. “You are Lord of Winterfell.”

Sansa does not miss the little hitch in his breath at the end of her words, but Jon recovers and takes a seat in the chair opposite hers, beside the table and just beyond the fire’s aura of light. Jon would like to tell her that he is not a Stark; she can see the bitter habit rising like bile in his shadowed expression. 

“You wish for me to stay in Winterfell.” Jon’s conclusion is simply said, but betrays that he has already considered this, which injustice he could commit himself to.

Sansa continues: “If I stay, there will be a stranger in Winterfell.” 

When he rises to his feet and resumes his pacing, his voice is strained, but she is certain he already understands. “Then it should be as simple as that. I stay and rule as the Bastard of Winterfell and send Eddard Stark’s daughter away from her home.” Back to the arms of those who have allowed ill to befall her before, his eyes accuse no one but himself. Jon knows the truth of everything, though Sansa does not know the story of his ordeals beyond whispers. The back of Sansa’s throat tightens once more to think of those things; how broken the two of them are, each in their own way. 

“We need not limit ourselves such,” she explains in a strangely calm voice that startles Jon so much that he stops just short of tripping himself. His expression is unusually clear with its shock, but she does not waver in looking back at him. They are so different than they were as children, but Jon appears to realize for the first time the depth of Sansa’s changes.

She has given this some thought in the months since word came that Jon was alive and legitimized and returning to Winterfell. At first it was little more than a passing notion conceived in her desperate will to stay, an idle fantasy as quickly dismissed as considered, but she allows it to return to her now. And what should be so wrong about it? The Targaryens marry their sisters and aunts and have done so for generation, breeding and rebreeding madness into their blood. Sansa understands the danger of that, but she only wishes that Jon were still her brother and she has learned nothing so much as that wishes do not make anything real. There must be a Stark in Winterfell. They are what remain of House Stark. What could be more right?

“ _Sansa_ ,” Jon says with his eyes searching her face for something, and he retreats a few steps into a dark corner, away from the light and away from her. 

Whatever of his protest was meant to come next is forgotten when Sansa stands and follows him, leaving her fur-lined cloak in the chair and the bitter tea by the fire. Looking at him, her heart pounds a little harder and her legs feel as leaden as they had when he arrived. There is nothing she needs more than something familiar. Bastard or brother or cousin, Jon is her family, and she knows him. Her fingertips brush his hair back from his face with the gentlest touch she can summon through trembling nerves. Even in the dim light, she can see the scars there, the outward evidence of Jon’s heroics, and she kisses the one nearest his eyes. 

Jon’s hands move at his sides and though Sansa expects him to grab her hands and push her away, they do no more than that. He stands still as stone and when Sansa peers up at his eyes, she sees her father, and she sees the lingering fear. Jon has grown into a man; he has been Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, he is the son of Prince Rhaegar Targaryen and, in his eyes, he is still Jon Snow, the bastard boy desperate to understand himself. 

(Sansa does not insult him by thinking that Alayne Stone is anything like Jon Snow, for Alayne was shielded from the abuse that he lived with day by day, and she was only ever temporary, never real. Never real, she reminds herself every morning when she wakes remembering, believing, and the shadowed pre-dawn makes her hair seem dark once more.)

“Oh, Jon,” Sansa breathes to the skin on his neck, and his hands move again, lift and rest on her ribs. Jon has shown her affection in the most reserved ways since arriving, but nothing like that first, unguarded moment when he embraced her and her heart nearly burst with relief and dangerous hope. That same feeling swells in her belly, but while Sansa controls herself, she feels the drop of hot tears on her shoulder when Jon holds her tighter. So he has been restraining himself, she realizes, as she has been. Every little thing he’s done around her seems significant now, to be scrutinized when she’s alone again, all the artless, innocent ways Jon wears his emotions only half-covered. 

Her hands guide him and they stumble without grace toward his bed. Jon has recovered himself by the time Sansa’s knees bump against the bed she only faintly recalls ordering into his room when she found he was coming. Sansa grasps with stretched fingers for purchase, but Jon takes her hand into his own, rough with scars, and guides it gently back toward them. He steps like a dancer and brings her down onto his lap when he falls backward onto the bed the way Sansa had prepared herself to. The light impact knocks a nervous laugh out of her and even Jon smiles faintly at her. It’s Sansa who leans into him and crushes her lips against his, straddles his hips and pushes her knees into the furs beneath him. She feels the familiar ache in her ladyflower, the slick wetness on her thighs she could have hardly expected to come so easily, at so little provocation. 

Sansa is no maiden, but nor is Jon’s touch that of a cloying virgin. He pushes back into her kiss with a willing eagerness that heats her through her core and breaks it only to awkwardly shrug off his black tunic. Her gown follows and Jon hesitates where Sansa does not. She is conscious of how practiced, how steady her hands are, but he doesn’t question her, and she forgets that she has been ashamed of those things. Sansa forgets a great deal when Jon’s palms graze her ribs once more, moving upward to her face, and she leans heavily into his touch, thinks that it is the kind of tenderness she would expect from the brother that Jon is not, the kind of warmth few have spared for her these years. 

If this is a seduction, a persuasive attempt to bring him around, Sansa might be ashamed of herself because Jon would never be able to argue against that. She considers her lessons in intrigue as she rests her hips against his and rolls her body against his fluidly, questions her own motivations, whether she is using Jon to stay in Winterfell. Jon bites into her lower lip, breaks her damning self-evaluation and even smiles apologetically when he kisses the swollen mark, and Sansa is so glad for him that she knows this is no manipulative intrigue. Tension slides from her spine when she feels herself push up against the long shaft of his stiff manhood, feels the head of it against the curious button that is the very center of her pleasure. Her stuttered cry is far too loud, but so too is Jon’s. Sansa closes her eyes and kisses him again, open-mouthed and whimpering somewhere in her throat. 

She is dimly aware of his hand on her spine and the other in her hair when she takes him in her soft, lady’s hand and strokes along the angled curve of his cock, thumbing the tip and finding a single bead of sticky fluid with some delight. Oh, she desires him, his company and his affection and whatever else that could come from this. Sansa raises her hips, opens her eyes to see Jon’s parted lips when he slides his hand down to her thigh, and stares at him directly. It could be as easy as this. If they both want it more than anything, family and familiar comfort, what could be so wrong with keeping them both home?

Jon utters a quiet curse, covers her hand around his cock with his, and holds perfectly still when the head nudges her lips apart, allows Sansa to make her choice.

“Yes,” she pushes out with a lungful of air she’s held without realizing, perhaps as long as he’s been home in Winterfell. Her voice is not the weak thing it once was, timid and shy, and she asserts herself strongly, slides her hips down over him with little more than a sweet sigh, “Jon, yes.”

Sansa moves first, while Jon adjusts to her weight and the slow-burning heat between them that negates the creeping chill from the windows, the snow falling steady and heavy outside. She heard him tell his friend that he’s been so much colder at the Wall and beyond during their supper, so she feels safe assuming the gooseflesh on his arms is from anticipation, from her and her touch. When Jon does move, it is with slow deliberation, steadied hands caressing the jutting bones at her hips, the edge of fingertips caressing her womanhood, each thrust upward carefully timed to meet her as she pushes down onto him. Once more, as she puts an arm around his neck and closes her fingers around his loose, dark curls, Sansa recalls Jon’s youthful melancholy, his sadness, but not the thoughtful affection he’s developed as a man; thinks how much a Stark Jon is, how unfair she has been in denying him that, how sweet this reunion is.

“Jon,” she says again with her cheek against his, and then repeats his name once more, twice, and loses count after that, even as her whispers turn to whimpers, then hoarse cries resonating and reverberating back toward her from the stone walls. The force of her release consumes her like fire climbing through her veins, pushing her back into a soft arch when her head falls heavily and her hair cascades free of its fastenings, glinting gold and deeply red in the light of the fire.

His hands reach out to touch the length of it and something far away and painful flashes across his face so fast that Sansa almost thinks she’s imagined it in the glowing haze of her pleasure until his gaze holds hers again. Jon kisses her with a touch more remorse than before, with desperation she imagines has only a little to do with his stiff manhood and a great deal more to do with something lost. (How little she knows, Sansa thinks with admonishing sharpness, and how much she has yet to learn. Jon too will have to learn to release his mourning for what has been lost, to move forward with what he has, and she supposes that will be the first, perhaps the only lesson she can ever give him in healing himself.) 

Jon muffles a groan in her plush, parted mouth, and Sansa feels him swell in her too-sensitive quim, aware at perhaps just the same moment that Jon is that he is nearing climax. She does not hesitate the way Jon does and presses her knees against his thighs, tightens her whole body with a powerful echo of her previous orgasm, and trembles along with him when he shudders out a silent cry and empties himself inside her. 

The fire crackles down to embers while Sansa kisses his rough cheeks, laughs quietly when Jon turns his head to follow hers and catches her lip with his teeth. His hands are reverent and gentle, the way a brother’s should be for his sister or a man for his lover. Jon lays her down next to him, his fingers in her hair and hers on his bare hip. She feels as if he is irretrievably bound to her, she to him, as if they could be no more separated from one another than from their respective trials. It isn’t certain what can be said now, if she could ask about his distant losses or the Queen’s proposal or about anything at all. Sansa is fortunate; Jon speaks in a quiet, ragged voice somewhere by her ear. 

“There must always be a Stark in Winterfell,” he says solemnly, warming her as surely as the fire and his hands and their blankets, and Sansa dares to hope.


End file.
